Report Urges Reinvestment in Earth Observation Missions

House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon
(D-Tenn.) applauded a new National Academy of Sciences report urging the U.S.
government to fund 17 Earth-observing satellite missions between 2010 and 2020
in order to rebuild the nation's aging network of environmental spacecraft.

Without the reinvestment, the report warns, the number of U.S.
satellites monitoring the Earth's climate could drop from 29 today to seven by
2017.

Gordon said the findings should come as no surprise to
anyone who has paid attention to the budget cuts NASA's Earth science program
has sustained since 2000 and the disruption on National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) observation programs caused by cost overruns on the
nation's next-generation weather satellite systems.

Gordon said his committee would be "watching closely" to see
whether the 2008 budget request the White House puts forward in February is
consistent with the recommendations in the report, "Earth Science and
Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond,"
a 10-year-plan for U.S. Earth science missions known as a decadal survey, which
can be found here. The first-of-its-kind
assessment was released by the National Academy of Sciences Jan. 15 at the
American Meteorological Society's annual meeting in San Antonio.

"The decadal survey recommends a path forward that restores
U.S. leadership in Earth science and avoids potential collapse of our system of
Earth science satellites," said Richard Anthes, co-chairman of the
two-year-study and newly elected president of the American Meteorological
Society.

To fund the missions proposed in the report, NASA would have
to go back to spending $2 billion a year on Earth science while NOAA would have
to maintain a steady $1 billion annual investment in satellites and instruments
that monitor Earth's climate.

Two of the proposed missions identified in the report would
be undertaken by NOAA. The remaining 15 would be NASA's responsibility.

Half of the proposed missions, the report estimates, could
be accomplished for $300 million or less with none costing more than $800
million in today's dollars.

The first of the new missions proposed that is not already
in NASA's or NOAA's pipeline is DESDynI, which stands for Deformation, Ecosystem
Structure and Dynamics of Ice. Anthes said DESDynI would cost an estimated $700
million and be designed to fly a Ka-band interferometric synthetic aperture
radar instrument and laser altimeter in a sun-synchronous low Earth orbit.

Another early mission, the Climate Absolute Radiance and
Refractivity Observatory, or Clarreo, would be a joint effort of NASA and NOAA,
with NASA covering the bulk of the project's $265 million price tag.

The most expensive of the proposed missions is the ACE
(Aerosol/Clouds/Ecosystem) mission. According to the National Academy of
Sciences report, the satellite for that $800 million mission would be equipped
with four instruments. The launch would take place between 2013 and 2016 to
help reduce uncertainties in predictions about global climate change.

NASA made a robust investment in environmental satellites in
the 1990s, building an Earth Observing System that was completed in 2004 with
the launch of the multiple-instrument Aura satellite. The three satellites in
the system were complemented by the launch of several smaller, more focused
satellites, including Cloudsat and Calipso, which launched as a pair in early
2006.

Thanks to that robust investment -- as well as launch delays
and satellites lasting longer than expected -- the United States has an
unprecedented number of environmental spacecraft and instruments currently in
orbit: 29 operating satellites and 122 instruments, according to the report.

But "a great fraction" of those Earth-observation
capabilities are expected to go dark over the next few years, Anthes said. The
report forecasts a 40 percent decline in the number of working sensors and
instruments on orbit "given that most satellites in NASA's current fleet are
well past their nominal lifetimes."

NASA has a small number of new missions in development,
including the single-instrument Orbiting Carbon Observatory, the Ocean Surface
Topography Mission, and a greenhouse gas-monitoring satellite dubbed Glory. All
three are slated to launch in 2008, according to NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center's Earth Observing System Web site.

NASA also has in development for a 2009 or 2010 launch a
multi-instrument satellite designed to serve as a bridge between the first
round of Earth Observing System missions and the launch of the National
Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) next decade.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin testified before the House Science and
Technology Committee last June that the NPOESS Preparatory Mission would help ensure
the continuous collection of certain Earth Observing Systems measurements and
provide flight validation of some key NPOESS sensors, including the
behind-schedule Visible/Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite.

The NPOESS program was restructured in July when its
projected cost soared from $6.8 billion to more than $11 billion. As part of
the restructuring, several key climate, environmental and weather observation
capabilities important to scientists were dropped from NPOESS. The sensors that
are still part of the NPOESS plan, the report says, "are generally less capable
than their Earth Observing System counterparts."

The report recommends adding capabilities back to NPOESS or
finding a way to obtain them by other means. In addition to laying out a phased
sequence of new missions from 2010 to 2020, the report urges NASA to take a
number of more immediate steps, among them committing to launching a Landsat 7
no later than 2011 and launching the long-planned Global Precipitation
Measurement mission not later than 2012.

The report also calls for NASA to complete the
Geosynchronous Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer and find a ride for it.
The instrument was being built for an experimental weather satellite called
Earth Observer-3, a satellite that lost its U.S. Air Force-sponsored launch
reservation amid budget uncertainties and subsequently was canceled.